The Russian Association of Wind Power Energy (RAWI) is delighted to congratulate all its members, as well as all wind energy market professionals, on a common professional holiday, the Power Engineer’s Day which is celebrated annually on December 22.
We sincerely wish you strong business achievements, further victories and accomplishments and may good friends and reliable partners be always support you during the journey. Let the lessons learned and results achieved by you be embodied in successful projects, and let the business in which you invest your efforts and put out your energies, always prosper.
Thanks to you, the Russian wind energy market is actively growing, and now there are 30 wind farms in place with a total installed capacity of 905 MW in Russia, of which 10 have been built in just the last three years.
Thanks to the existing public support programme for RES CDAs, the total wind capacity has increased almost 10 times since 2015. In the Ulyanovsk, Rostov, Leningrad and Nizhny Novgorod Oblasts (regions), new world-class production sites providing almost 1200 new jobs have been created.
In April 2020, despite the coronavirus pandemic, the first batch of wind turbine blades earlier manufactured at a plant in the Ulyanovsk Oblast was shipped for export. And this is a major accomplishment!
Meanwhile, three giant suspenses best sum up Russia’s wind energy market now.
Chairman of the RAWI Board Igor Bryzgunov notes “The first one is allowing the RES CDA support scheme to continue in 2025-2035 in the agreements earlier reached with the Russian government. If this does not happen, foreign investors will leave the country, and all the players will be left with a new state monopoly with the expected results, corruption risks and administered prices, and one can forget about the competitive market.”
In his opinion, the second intrigue lies is the excessive market regulation, which does not make it possible to apply new business models, boxes projects in isolated regions and leads to the need to come up with all sorts of subsidies.
“Who’s to say that a wind farm investor couldn’t sell power produced at the site, even if to another region, at a retail price? Modern mechanisms of smart contracts make it possible while sticking to the old paradigm of power sales policy. But so far, unfortunately, we are being put ‘over a barrel’,” he says.
The third trend, he notes, is the new green hydrogen technologies that can be used for another technology-based redivision of the renewable energy market. Electrolysis has already become a part of the new technological solutions for the future. Wind power technologies are one of the most promising ways to generate new green power anywhere while offering great export potential.
Dear all! Happy Power engineer’s Day!